


A Dance for Ariadne

by thatsrightdollface



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Greek Mythology - Freeform, I wrote this when I was supposed to be sleeping, Love, Self Sacrifice, Theseus is a jerk, memories of another life, missing someone you've never met
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 22:52:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12640932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: When Dionysus offered dances to the masses, to anyone, to the faceless “You” that he loved more than he could say and would surely, surely, give his blazing life for, maybe he saw Ariadne in all of them.Or, Dio thinks about his past lives a little, and how it had felt to truly rescue someone way back when.





	A Dance for Ariadne

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!!! If you read this, I hope you enjoy it. :) I've only read up to the end of Volume Five: Imperial Phase 1, 'cause I've been reading the volumes instead of the monthlies. Sorry for anything I got wrong!

That newly claimed Dionysus - the neon bright dance floor that walked like a man, the laughing god that was worrying about paying rent just last week - never had to read any of his own stories to know them. They flooded his head like wine overflowing from a cup, poured and poured even when your hands were already nice and sticky and stained a purple-red so much sweeter than a wound.  He figured it was probably like that for all the flickering-candle gods, born to themselves in an instant. You had to catch up to who you were quick, and he knew all of a sudden he was release and wildness, madness and surrender. 

He would be loved. He would be hated. He would die like all the lights going out at once, the party clicking off but lingering like a half-remembered song for all time. 

So of course Dio knew about how the original Dionysus had let that first grape vine coil from the corpse of a satyr he’d loved, the fruit swelling with his blood. A drink of mourning and joy, of love and a rawness Dionysus would be able to feel again whenever he needed to.  Dio had to feel that, too, filtered through flashing rave lights and a beat that thudded through his bones and reminded him of his fragile human parts. Filtered through everything he was now, that he had never been before. Dionysus had never been this man, with all these wants and memories. He was himself, and he was more, and he knew he would have felt that constant shifting more completely if he let himself rest. If he gave himself over to whatever a god like Dionysus would dream about in drunken stupors, in opium hazes, in the final swooning drop at the end of all that dancing. 

This new Dionysus never slept, of course. 

He let the stories wash over him, though, as he channeled a hundred humming minds. As he led his dizzy aurora borealis revels. He knew about turning the slavers into dolphins out on a ship wrapped up all tight in his shifting, clutching vines. He knew about tending to his mother’s still-smoldering grave, dusting it clean with the palm of his hand and wondering why no one else seemed to mourn her. 

He knew, of course, about Ariadne, and he knew how it had felt to turn her empty, haunted face into a smiling one again. 

The original Dionysus found Ariadne washed up and fading on an island, yeah. Some douchebag had said he’d marry her if she led him through her father’s labyrinth, but then he left her to die. To grow parched and hopeless on the sand. Dionysus found her there, and made her his wife. He made her eternal, and loved her as completely as any god in his scheming, wanting pantheon ever could. 

Dio knew how that original Dionysus had felt coming up to Ariadne, his feet sinking into hot, bitter sand, his entourage giggling behind him. Smeared in honey and ecstasy, wound up like tops, their lips so wine-dark you could taste grapes just by looking at them. He had seen this girl with tangled hair and a ruined dress, skin blistering in the sun. He had wanted to be everything she needed. 

And now, in this new life, in this new skin, Dio knew his Ariadne wasn’t anywhere.  He wouldn’t have ached to bend her back over a bed of vines and splattering grapes, no, not the same way that original Dionysus had.  He was asexual, whatever memories of wanting her like that had come to him from lives gone by. But he would have wanted to love her. He could have held her hand and spun her - he could have watched her laugh with a crazed abandon, finally forgiving the world, finally free of what had kept her curled into herself on the sand. Free because of him. Because he’d been there for her, and because he had been hers. 

Maybe, if Dio knew Ariadne in this life, she would have helped him realize he could sleep. Maybe he would have felt like enough.  He had felt like enough before - he knew he had, even if everything was rushed, now, and he felt death tugging at his hands all the time. Stinging behind his bloodshot electric eyes. Aching in the muscles he hadn’t been able to release for so long. 

Dionysus was always enough to Ariadne, whether as lover or girlfriend, bestie or savior. 

But Ariadne hadn’t been reborn that cycle, and Dio saw her in other faces, instead. He saw her in the strung out junkies who threw themselves into his release, into his forgetting. He saw her in the people who came to him lonely, hurting and empty, wanting something real. 

When Dionysus offered dances to the masses, to anyone, to the faceless “You” that he loved more than he could say and would surely, surely, give his blazing life for, maybe he saw Ariadne in all of them. 

He was their champion. He was a god reborn and needing to belong to someone.   Dionysus had always sheltered outcasts; Dionysus had always tried to be kind until he couldn’t be kind anymore. 

If you touched this Dionysus’s impossible, chemical skin, maybe he would have drawn you close into a dance full of peace and power and change, completeness and forever spinning. Maybe he would give you a dance so much like Ariadne’s. 


End file.
